The Book

The Miami Showband Massacre
A survivor’s search for the truth

On 31 July 1975, members of The Miami Showband were returning to Dublin after a gig in Banbridge when they were stopped at a military checkpoint. For Stephen Travers, the band’s new bass player, it was an unusual experience but he wasn’t too worried. This was during The Troubles, after all.
However, as the musicians were lined up beside their van, Stephen noticed that the atmosphere had suddenly changed – something more sinister was happening.
In a flash, their lives were dramatically altered when a bomb that was being placed in their van exploded prematurely. The events of that night would never leave Stephen Travers – being hurled into the air by the explosion, listening to the cries of his friends as they were mercilessly gunned down and the steps of the gunmen getting closer as they approached to finish him off…
This atrocity is now known to have been carried out by The Glenanne Gang, a British protected assortment of serving police officers, locally recruited British Army soldiers and well-known assassins and Loyalist paramilitaries. As such, The Miami Showband Massacre stands as an obscene monument to Collusion between official British security services and Loyalist terrorists. At the time the very notion of Collusion was often thought of as “conspiracy theory”. Now of course, even mainstream media considers Collusion as the last untold story of The Troubles. This book is testament to that fact but more importantly is also testament to the indefatigable courage of the survivors and their supporters.
One of this book’s authors, survivor Stephen Travers, searches in these pages for the truth. Who carried out the murders of his fellow band members, Tony Geraghty, Fran O’Toole and Brian McCoy? Who ordered them to do it? Who has covered up the truth – and continues to cover up the truth – about The Miami Showband Massacres? And what depths of hatred could “inspire” human beings to carry our such an appalling act?